I wanted to take it lite this week because I have been in talks with a university so that I can go back to school to become a librarian and coupled with my six-day work week, really does not let me have much free time for games. Anyway, I remember seeing this week’s game randomly and thought that it would be fun enough to let my imagination run wild and just create. Little did I know that inside the Steam Community was a treasure trove of infinite ideas on cityscapes and detailed walkthroughs of depth to create more lively cities. This week is Summerhouse.

SummerHouse is a cozy sandbox game from friedemann and Future Friends Games. The game was released on March 8th, 2024 for the PC and retails for $5.

Summerhouse is simple: Build. The game opens up to a few different landscapes: City outskirts, desert, and a picturesque mountain region. Once you choose you are given the tools to create. Foundations, roofs, doors, windows, steps, and a wide range of extras to breathe life into what you create.

There are day, night, and stormy weather cycles that show off just how great the game can look.

I started out small, getting an idea of how the game wanted me to build, but after the second map, I realized that borderline anything could be done.

Q and E allow the player to place items into the background, creating a sense of depth to the collections of buildings that you are creating. It then hit me that I could create whole cityscapes if I wanted to. This is when I decided to look at the Steam Community area to see what other secrets the game had and I was pleased with what I was reading.

The pixel style is probably the best fit for this game. It makes the game look so incredibly beautiful. My favorite is the night cycle because the windows that you place will light up as if someone is inside. A simple but fantastic addition.

Summerhouse is a great, cheap video game. It is simple in the idea that all you have to do is build until your heart is content, but it allows for so much more. Creating heavily detailed cityscapes with only a handful of different building items is exciting because the game relies on the player’s imagination to run wild. Summerhouse puts the player in control and it creates such a wonderful video game filled with love and spearheaded by creativity.

And for $5, it is an absolute steal.